From its opening mix of deliberately incongruous images (“mossy glens,” “substances like boils,” and “glowworm winks”) to its deft use of Victorian and modern theories of the grotesque, to its innovative concluding gambit, Taylor LeMaire‘s essay maps its own way through two exceptionally complex poems and the rich terrain of the aesthetics of the grotesque. The essay is notably original first of all in comparing two classic Victorian texts very seldom considered in conjunction, though they were published within five years of each other. Secondly, LeMaire focuses not on the ugliness, lapses, and incongruity conventionally associated with the grotesque, but on its “positive” functions in both Browning‘s “‘Childe Roland‘” and Rossetti‘s “Goblin Market.” After a close and convincing analysis of strategically chosen textual details, combining consideration of poetic form with metaphoric and thematic content, LeMaire concludes with a surprising but apt shift from visual to sonic modes of the grotesque. She pairs the blast of the “slug-horn” that occurs at the end of Childe Roland‘s quest when he reaches the “dark tower” with the animal-human goblin men‘s seductive “cries” that ring enticingly in our ears in the opening of Rossetti‘s poem. An exemplary essay. Whether one sound is ultimately more “positive” and beneficial than the other is left more open to question. As Browning‘s Roland says of the mysterious appearance of the "dark tower," “solve it, you!” –Dr. Marjorie Stone
